The Protection Paladin Field Manual (WoW-3.0/WotLK) - Page 37

Yelp · 02/06/09, 1:18 AM

Originally Posted by Russta

...The only problem I see with the Guarded by the Light change is that we're already GCD locked in a 969 rotation.

Oh, and I'm really hoping Holy Wrath gets the same treatment as Exorcism.

The way I read it, you put up the DP buff, and ShoR, HS, and AS all keep it from ever falling off--it's a constant 472 mp/5 while attacking or being attacked, without using any GCDs.

And I agree with Holy Wrath--it's incredibly useful for starting trash pulls, and I'll hate to see it move into obscurity as we move into Ulduar.

SeanDamnit · 02/06/09, 1:57 AM

Originally Posted by Yelp

The way I read it, you put up the DP buff, and ShoR, HS, and AS all keep it from ever falling off--it's a constant 472 mp/5 while attacking or being attacked, without using any GCDs.

And I agree with Holy Wrath--it's incredibly useful for starting trash pulls, and I'll hate to see it move into obscurity as we move into Ulduar.

If that's the case, then that's a good amount of mana regen when our mana returns are not in bad shape as it is. Maybe they are planning on removing BoS and are adding this buff to make up for it?

Dippyskoodlez · 02/06/09, 2:01 AM

Originally Posted by Yelp

The way I read it, you put up the DP buff, and ShoR, HS, and AS all keep it from ever falling off--it's a constant 472 mp/5 while attacking or being attacked, without using any GCDs.

And I agree with Holy Wrath--it's incredibly useful for starting trash pulls, and I'll hate to see it move into obscurity as we move into Ulduar.

Looks like I should just take Judgement of Light off my hotbars now? And what about Touched by the light's crit bonus? If we're keeping Divine plea active to heal (which would probably be really cool for helping out in a situation where healing is needed more than dps) we're going to get annhiliated by the 50% healing reduction. And the 50% damage penalty on shield wall? Ick. Ret and holy have gimped 2 nice tanking abilitys...

Also, if we get around 5-8 talent points, we could get the hand of freedom talent for pvp, along with eye for an eye (which makes for a great porcupine spec)... and possibly go deeper into Holy to get illumination for an off healer spec. Not tanking? Toss on full holy crit gear, and keep divine plea active.

Blizzard has shown that they want prot to be PVP viable, but where's the pvp gear? Gear right now doesn't have enough sockets to fill with resilience gems!

Originally Posted by SeanDamnit

If that's the case, then that's a good amount of mana regen when our mana returns are not in bad shape as it is. Maybe they are planning on removing BoS and are adding this buff to make up for it?

Blizzard expressing dislike to SA, is a change that is MUCH appreciated. As a holy paladin in sunwell it was so much of my regen, not getting damaged on twins would be game over..... I would predict a complete SA removal. Although this in turn would warrant a judgements of the wise buff, especially if we have to rely on exorcism in Ulduar. So this leaves BoSanc.... which if we have full time divine plea, makes it feel just like it did Pre-Bc. laughable.

• frmorrison · 02/06/09, 2:02 AM

Originally Posted by Russta

Will be pretty funny if they don't replace Kings with anything considering they still haven't replaced the old 11 point Kings with anything yet.

Oh, and I'm really hoping Holy Wrath gets the same treatment as Exorcism.

Since the devs are not crazy, I believe the 11 point Prot talent will be imp HoJ (10 seconds off cooldown), since Judgement of the Just gives 20 seconds off HoJ.

Paladins already do really well in PvP, so making Wrath hit non-undead is a bad idea. Be happy Paladins finally will have a ranged spell that isn't a Taunt for all specs.

• promdates · 02/06/09, 2:48 AM

Originally Posted by frmorrison

Since the devs are not crazy, I believe the 11 point Prot talent will be imp HoJ (10 seconds off cooldown), since Judgement of the Just gives 20 seconds off HoJ.

Or they can turn it into 2 talent points for 15/30 (since it doesn't seem to be that overpowered in pvp right now with every other class getting all kinds of stuns/interrupts out the ass), which gives paladin tanks a 10 sec interrupt/stun comparable with warriors.

Arthaal · 02/06/09, 3:19 AM

If they do that, combined with the other changes in prot (longer SoJ stuns, better mana sustainability, long range/long cooldown silence, short range/short cooldown silence) and decent burst high block builds can already output, prot could become quite a decent PvP build... Supposing they finally manage to bring back the arena chess game pardigm over the current damage arms race.

Russta · 02/06/09, 6:20 AM

Originally Posted by Yelp

The way I read it, you put up the DP buff, and ShoR, HS, and AS all keep it from ever falling off--it's a constant 472 mp/5 while attacking or being attacked, without using any GCDs.

After re-reading it, I agree that this is probably how it is which would make it really damn nice. Along with what they said about Warriors, this change seems to mark the end of Blessing of Sanctuary as we know it which I believe is good for the game. As a buff, I don't really care for BoS, I just don't want to go back to the mana issues we had to put up with in TBC.

Assuming they remove Spiritual Attunement completely (or effectively render it useless) and the mana return aspect of Blessing of Sanctuary, I'm not sure if, mana wise, we will work out better or worse than we are now in a balanced situation. I do know that this will be huge improvement for offtanking when we aren't dodging to get returns.

Originally Posted by frmorrison

Since the devs are not crazy, I believe the 11 point Prot talent will be imp HoJ (10 seconds off cooldown), since Judgement of the Just gives 20 seconds off HoJ.

There goes my fantasy of a 10 second Hammer of Justice

bellator · 02/06/09, 9:09 AM

Originally Posted by Russta

Assuming they remove Spiritual Attunement completely (or effectively render it useless) and the mana return aspect of Blessing of Sanctuary, I'm not sure if, mana wise, we will work out better or worse than we are now in a balanced situation. I do know that this will be huge improvement for offtanking when we aren't dodging to get returns.

I agree it looks likely that the mana regen part of BoSanc is soon to go, but in a tanking raid situation I think removing both BoSanc and SA would be very bad for a prot paladin. (ofc when not tanking this would be a buff, but in 3.1 when i'm not tanking i'll be hitting my dps spec change button)

If we assume mana raid buffed is 7500, the divine plea buff will go from roughly 31mps to 94mps. A gain of 63mps.

Now if we look at Blessing of Sanctuary alone it returns 150mana per block/dodge/parry. In a raid situation, with holy shield up a prot pala has a roughly (indluding insect swarm) 93% chance to block/dodge/parry an attack which means that on average an enemies melee swing will restore 93% * 150 = 140 mana to the paladin

Thus the intersection between DP gain / BoSanc loss in terms of incoming melee attack speed is about 2.2seconds (140/63). Anything faster than this would mean we lose more from BoSanc than we gain from DP and vica versa. In most tanking situations in a raid this already means we will be at a slight mana loss (though only a small loss). If they took SA out as well we would have a very large deficit to what we have now and could be in mana trouble.

Personally I don't see SA as too bad an issue for prot paladins compared to holy/ret, so why not just make it a deep prot talent (with a slight nerf if felt it's too powerful for pvp)

On a side note, i hope the Shield of Righteousness bug appears again in 3.1....perma silence

Tharia · 02/06/09, 9:27 AM

They changed silence to have diminishing returns in the last patch or the one before that, don't remember exactly. Otherwise we would get 9 sec worth of silence even without the ShoR bug by chaining ShoR and AS, might be too poweful really :P

Cathela · 02/06/09, 9:29 AM

Does the silence on ShR sound overpowered to anyone else? It's already a very powerful burst-damage ability -- I can hit 4500 non-crit in blockvalue gear with libram/trinket/wings already and I'm still missing a few blockvalue pieces. Doing that kind of damage, ignoring armor, being parry/dodge immune, and also getting a 50% uptime on a silence effect seems like an awfully powerful single ability.

(Or am I just broadcasting my lack of arena experience by even thinking this would be an issue?)

I mentioned the lack of Prot PvP gear during the beta. It affects Prot warriors every bit as much as it affects us, so I'd think it's something they'd want to address if they're serious about making these specs PvP viable. If they don't give us a prot-specific PvP set, then we can probably do decently well with the Ret PvP gear. A strength-focused set will actually give higher overall dps than one with blockvalue, but it won't have quite the burst potential.

The other issue would be the lack of avoidance on a prot PvP set, since parry/dodge/block/defense aren't particularly good general PvP stats. But if the power-on-avoidance effect of BoSanct is being removed as you guys are speculating, then that wouldn't be an issue anymore.

And thank god they figured out how horrible the BoK situation is.

[E:]

Originally Posted by Tharia

They changed silence to have diminishing returns in the last patch or the one before that, don't remember exactly. Otherwise we would get 9 sec worth of silence even without the ShoR bug by chaining ShoR and AS, might be too poweful really :P

Even with diminishing returns, it would still be:

- 3.0 seconds silenced
- (un-silenced gap if you want)
- 1.5 seconds silenced
- (1.5 seconds or less un-silenced)
- 0.75 seconds silenced

That's still going to be enough to screw up anyone's casting aside from perhaps 1-2 instants in the gaps. And if they don't have a trinket available, you can chain an HoJ onto either end and largely incapacitate them for 10+ seconds continuously.

Again, I'm a PvP noob, so I may be misjudging things, but right now I'd be really really surprised if the ShR silence goes live like this.

Marlah · 02/06/09, 9:48 AM

Originally Posted by Dippyskoodlez

Looks like I should just take Judgement of Light off my hotbars now? And what about Touched by the light's crit bonus? If we're keeping Divine plea active to heal (which would probably be really cool for helping out in a situation where healing is needed more than dps) we're going to get annhiliated by the 50% healing reduction. And the 50% damage penalty on shield wall? Ick. Ret and holy have gimped 2 nice tanking abilitys...

Also, if we get around 5-8 talent points, we could get the hand of freedom talent for pvp, along with eye for an eye (which makes for a great porcupine spec)... and possibly go deeper into Holy to get illumination for an off healer spec. Not tanking? Toss on full holy crit gear, and keep divine plea active.

Blizzard has shown that they want prot to be PVP viable, but where's the pvp gear? Gear right now doesn't have enough sockets to fill with resilience gems!

Blizzard expressing dislike to SA, is a change that is MUCH appreciated. As a holy paladin in sunwell it was so much of my regen, not getting damaged on twins would be game over..... I would predict a complete SA removal. Although this in turn would warrant a judgements of the wise buff, especially if we have to rely on exorcism in Ulduar. So this leaves BoSanc.... which if we have full time divine plea, makes it feel just like it did Pre-Bc. laughable.

In what way is Divine Protection (our shield wall) being nerfed, so that we do 50% less dmg while it is activated? Where has Blizzard stated this?

I think that it is quite certain that they are changing BoS fundamentally. Either removing it altogether (and implementing the 3% mitigation in other talents or are we supposed to manage without it altogether?) thus making kings our first hand choice tanking blessing. Or they keep BoS for the protpalas to choose between 3% mitigation and kings, but still remove the mana/rage/rp return effect of the blessing. The latter would be stupid, why should we be forced to use a blessing that only increases mitigation and nothing else?

However, now that they are making Kings baseline there is reason to hope that their idea is to remove BoS altogether, base our mana regen on that Divine Plea refreshed automatically through Guarded by the light talent.

The Guarded by the Light buff will indeed up our pvp and offtanking viability but also our soloplay in general.

The only thing I'm worried, as other has poited out already, is what are they planning to fill the gaps in? They are cearly optimizing every prottalent but much is becoming empty. We still need to actually spend 50 points before getting our Hammer!

blacksuit · 02/06/09, 10:48 AM

It does look like BoS is going to die in 3.1. In addition to the continuous divine plea, you have this for warriors: "We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries."

With at least 6 and perhaps 8-10 points coming out of the prot tree, one wonders what they'll add. I'm guessing that a 3 second silence on ShoR is dead on arrival. The other things could put prot paladins close to prot warriors in terms of lock down capabilities.

Marlah · 02/06/09, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by blacksuit

It does look like BoS is going to die in 3.1. In addition to the continuous divine plea, you have this for warriors: "We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries."

With at least 6 and perhaps 8-10 points coming out of the prot tree, one wonders what they'll add. I'm guessing that a 3 second silence on ShoR is dead on arrival. The other things could put prot paladins close to prot warriors in terms of lock down capabilities.

I would be happy with an interrupt effect at the least on ShoR, because it feels like the skill itself lacks today due to the fact that only deals dmg/threat. Having Arcane Torrent on a 2 min cd and 1 min HoJ feels like paladins indeed need more ways to prevent spellcasting. However, they might need to tweak the Shield of Templar talent so they remove the silence effect on AS, at least.

Having a standard 30 sec CD on HoJ (3sec silence), 30 second CD on AvS that could theoretically silence up to 3 targets for 3 seconds each, 15 sec CD on Exorcism (talented it would provide 2 sec silence) and 6 second cd on ShoR that silences for 3 seconds. It seems overkill and a bit imbalanced to be honest.

Also, it would be nice if they consider changing HW the same way as Exorcism. Perhaps lower the spell power coefficient to reduce its dmg (it can indeed hit/crit a lot!), reduce the stun duration. Basically make it a Shockwave-like ability, same function but not as good as Shockwave itself since our would be baseline whilst warriors have to talent for theirs. The tradeoff for changing HW is that it of course would be a major nerf to its usage versus undeads but for overall tanking it would be an awesome aoe initial threat builde/cc. (Yeah, we have Consecrate but warriors have TClap and still get SW!)

jere · 02/06/09, 12:36 PM

Remember, these are not all the changes, just a preview. They might have changed HW to work like exorcism too, just didn't put it in the preview.

Saltycracker · 02/06/09, 12:48 PM

Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

So, what happens when we need to LoH ourselves? This talent would be better if it removed the healing reduction as well.